permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>]

A man I met recently made the statement that bird watching encourages you to
rely heavily on observation and inductive reasoning to develop pattern 
recognition skills,
which he considewred all-important.
He referred to an award-winning book by Bertrand Russel called "Unpopular 
Essays"
wherein Russell tried to shake the scientific community into greater use of 
indductive reasoning
(I think I have this right, if not, corrections are welcome).
He also mentioned the work of Nobel Prize-winning scientists Nikko Tinbergen, 
Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch,
the fathers of ethology (see quote below), as placing great emphasis on 
pattern recognition.
http://cas.bellarmine.edu/tietjen/Ethology/introduction_to_ethology.htm
"Konrad Lorenz, along with Karl von Frisch and Nikolaas Tinbergen are generally recognized as the "fathers of ethology" (read Lorenz's 1973 
Nobel Prize acceptance speech here which he shared with Karl von Frisch and Nikolaas Tinbergen; Fig 2). But the origins of ethology can be 
traced back to Charles Darwin and his work on the expressive movements of man and animals (the full text is available here). Darwin was the 
first to use a comparative phylogenetic method in the study of behavior."
--
L.F.London
lfl@intrex.net
http://market-farming.com
http://www.ibiblio.org/ecolandtech